John Crace surveys the past year's cricket books for Wisden

After decades of missing the big stories, cricket literature is at last addressing the dark side of the game, argues John Crace. As guest reviewer for the 150th edition of Wisden, he considers the best books in the field

Cricket writers have moved on and no longer struggle with the fact that the sport’s balance of power has shifted. Photograph: Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images

With the honour of being asked to be Wisden's literary reviewer for its 150th edition also comes the pleasure. The pleasure of getting to read every cricket publication that has crossed the cricket almanack's desk during the past year. While each tells its own particular story; collectively they document the state of cricket publishing. This year, roughly 70 books and pamphlets came my way. Most were (fairly) mainstream books from mainstream publishers, some were distinctly minority interest – The Statistics of the Minor Counties in 1906 – from not-so-mainstream publishers, and a few were self-published. For a sport and an industry sometimes held to be in decline, I'd say this was indication enough of good health.

But what of the quality? It's often said that cricket writing had its heyday with Neville Cardus, RC Robertson-Glasgow and CLR James, and that no one has come close to matching them in the past 50 years or so. In fairness, they were always going to be tough acts to follow. Cardus, Robertson-Glasgow and James weren't just great cricket writers, they were great writers for whom the game was a window on to class, history, colonialism, race, and, not forgetting, cricket's greatest gift to those who play it: hubris.

Yet there was a truth there. Cricket writing did become more torpid, more comfortable in their wake. Some of the heat of class and race had gone out of the game. The divisive distinction between Gentlemen and Players had been dropped; the West Indies, Pakistan and India were all emerging as strong Test teams; and, after a brief wobble in the late 1960s, apartheid South Africa had been banned from international cricket. These battles had been near enough won and cricket writing went back to doing what it does worst: just writing about cricket. There's a story, possibly apochryphal, that when the British diplomat Percy Norris was shot dead by extremists in India in 1984, the morning after hosting a reception for the English touring team, a British newspaper was caught out. Having only its cricket correspondent on the spot, it was forced to ask him to report the story. He wrote: "Despite the death of Percy Norris, the England team had net practice as usual …" If it isn't true, it ought to be.

Small-"c" conservatism became the order of the day and cricket writing largely reverted to authorised biographies and standardised histories. And in so doing was very late on the biggest stories: for years the Kerry Packer revolution, when some Test cricketers abandoned their countries for the money on offer from Australian television, was reported as a bunch of ungrateful professionals betraying the establishment rather than players getting their due. Many journals and writers still can't quite come to terms with the fact that cricket's balance of power has shifted several thousands of miles east to Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and Dubai.

There were always a few beacons of hope. John Arlott, Frank Keating, Matthew Engel, Scyld Berry and David Foot maintained the game's reputation for writing excellence during the plodding years, but over the last decade or so others have emerged to join them, and now the genre is as strong as it has ever been. They may not thank me for saying this, but the two Mikes – Selvey and Atherton – are a great deal more entertaining in print than they were on the field; the Australian, Gideon Haigh, is the best stylist in some years; Marcus Berkmann has spearheaded a new wave of humorists and writers such as Osman Samiuddin, Rahul Bhattacharya, Dileep Premachandran, Anand Vasu and Suresh Menon, from the Indian sub-continent, all now have a loud and distinctive voice.

Best of all, cricket writing is back on the money. Literally. There is no bigger story in cricket at the moment than its finances – particularly in regard to illegal betting. Predictably, the International Cricket Council is not that keen to investigate; its efforts limited to setting up any number of sub-committees that invariably seem to discover next to nothing. Cricket's writers have been far bolder and more successful on a fraction of the budget. Which is why my choice of Wisden cricket book of the year was Ed Hawkins's Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy (Bloomsbury). This wasn't the best-written book of the year – after a while, the breathless present tense becomes rather too, well, breathless – but it was far and away the most important, because it tried to get to the heart of the scandals that continue to dog the game.

Listen to the ICC and cricket's anti-corruption units, and you might imagine corruption was largely a thing of the past. Journalist and betting expert Ed Hawkins thought so too, until he started hearing rumours from Indian bookmakers that it was alive and kicking. One game in particular was brought to his attention: the 2011 World Cup semi-final between India and Pakistan at Mohali. According to his sources: "India would score more than 260 … then pak (sic) will cruise to 100, then lose 2 quick wickets, at 150 they will be 5 down and crumble and lose by a margin of over 20 runs." As Hawkins and an old friend, Cherenne, sat down to watch the match on television, they grew progressively more quiet. It's true that India made exactly 260 rather than more, but Pakistan reached 100 for two, slipped to 106 for four, lost their fifth wicket at 142, and were all out one ball before the end of the final over for 231. "You've stolen Christmas from me," Cherenne said as she left. "I'm never watching a game with you again."

After this tipoff, Hawkins embarked on a one-man, heart-of-darkness exercise in investigative gonzo journalism to see what else he could uncover. He headed off to India and met a host of spivs, runners, fixers and Mr Bigs, who are referred to by their first names only. The evidence he actually discovered was damning on a circumstantial level, rather than conclusive proof. But that was neither here nor there, for the immense advantage Hawkins has over other writers who have tried to get to the bottom of match-fixing is that he understands the mathematical nuances of betting.

The big match-fixing scams, such as the Cronje affair and, allegedly, the 2011 World Cup semi-final, may be the easiest for the lay person to grasp. But what Hawkins shows is that, due to the phenomenal amount of money wagered at any one time on even the most insignificant televised match, a very small amount of information can nudge the odds firmly in the bookmakers' favour. It's all about probability. A bookie with the right algorithms can make a fortune in marginal, high-volume bets from information as simple as knowing who is going to win the toss, or player selection. Throw in the knowledge of a bent, bought player, and it's a licence to print money.

In the process, Hawkins also exposes the 2010 Pakistan spot-fixing scandal – for which the cricket authorities were quick to claim the moral high ground – as something of a show trial. The whole purpose of the no-ball scam was not to influence the betting, but merely to prove that Salman Butt, Mohammad Aamer and Mohammad Asif could be got at. Bookmakers follow betting patterns on a second-by-second basis: if anyone tried to place a bet on something as specific as a no-ball, it would be rejected as abnormal. Whatever else bookies may be, as Hawkins points out, they are not stupid. But others appear to be. The real importance of this book lies in its existence. Over the past 15 years, the cricket authorities have spent millions of pounds on various match-fixing investigations and have uncovered very little. Armed with what was almost certainly an extremely modest advance, Hawkins on his own has uncovered substantially more, in less time.

I can't remember Gideon Haigh ever writing a duff sentence, and On Warne (Simon & Schuster) more than maintains his reputation as the most literary of the current breed of Australian cricket writers. There have been countless biographies – not to mention autobiographies – of "the greatest spin bowler who ever lived", and Haigh sensibly eschews this route, despite having spent more time with Warne over the years than many of his predecessors. Instead, as the title suggests, he has opted for something rather bolder: a philosophical treatise on the meaning of being Shane Warne; a deconstruction of genius.

If some of the material feels relatively familiar – the betting scandals, the weight-loss drugs, the infighting in the Australian dressing-room – Haigh's approach casts them in a new light. While never less than forensic in his analysis, he makes us reconsider the physical exertion and contortion in imparting so many revolutions on a ball, hour after hour, year after year; the burden of being every captain's go-to bowler; the expectation of being asked consistently to win the unwinnable; and the absurdity of finding a unique talent in someone who would be just as happy sitting on a beach, drinking beer with his mates.

My only small reservation is that Haigh perhaps loves his subject just a bit too much. Plenty have queued up to knock Warne for his off-field behaviour. But, while never avoiding the difficult issues, Haigh tends to give Warne the benefit of the doubt. Take the incident in which Warne and Mark Waugh were found to have accepted money from an Indian bookmaker on the 1994-95 tour of Sri Lanka in exchange for information about pitch conditions and team selection. Haigh's view is that it was an act of naivety on a very demanding tour, no real harm was intended or done, and however badly Warne and Waugh might have acted, they looked like saints in comparison with the Australian board's handling of the situation. All of which may, or may not, be true, but it rather misses the central point that Warne and Waugh did take the money on offer, and should have known better; deep down, they probably did. Why did no one else in the Australian team do the same? Why did they not even think to ask their team-mates whether they thought it was a good idea?

Haigh is equally lenient in regard to Warne's diet, drinking, gambling and womanising; his attitude being that countless other cricketers have done the same or worse, that Warne's behaviour away from cricket is a personal matter, and that he gets more flak simply because of his celebrity. These are valid points, but they close down the argument rather than open it up. The aim is not to pass moral judgment on Warne – as far as I'm concerned, he can do pretty much what he likes – but to understand him. Why is he so self-destructive? Is there a relationship between his personality flaws and his bowling genius?

An equally revealing and intimate portrait of a cricketer from a very different era came in the shape of David Tossell's Tony Greig (Pitch Publishing). For the last 30 years or so, the former England captain and all-rounder turned Australian broadcaster has, as Haigh pointed out, "been barely remembered as a cricketer".

Three things defined Greig in the public memory: his ill-advised declaration that he was going to make the 1976 West Indians "grovel", his leading role in Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket revolution, and his South African nationality. All three rightly take centre stage in Tossell's book, but so too does Greig himself, the flawed man whose father was an alcoholic, who suffered from epilepsy since he was 11, who took all criticism – fair or unfair – head on, without ever asking anyone to make excuses for him. And, along the way, we learn that Greig was rather a better cricketer than he has previously been given credit for. His Test batting average of 40 was higher than both Ian Botham's and Andrew Flintoff's; his bowling average was poorer than Botham's, but on a par with Flintoff's. All of which rather suggests he ought to be remembered as being among the three best English all-rounders of the postwar era.

The real pleasure of this book, though, lies primarily in the fact that Greig has trusted his story to the objectivity of a first-rate sports writer. This is no ghosted part-work, overfilled with self-justification and interminable anecdotes of parties and tour drinking bouts, which so often are passed off as intimacy and self-revelation. Greig appears to have given Tossell carte blanche to write what he wants, and has encouraged his family to have their say – not all of it flattering. When the news of Greig's death was announced shortly before the end of last year, I couldn't help wondering if he had known he didn't have long to live when he started working with Tossell. The book is certainly a fitting tribute to a man who was unusual in putting his integrity before legacy. Above all, it comes with the ring of truth. Yes, Greig never denies that qualifying for England was an act of career pragmatism, but never once is he an apologist for apartheid. Nor does he downplay, or have any regrets about, his mercenary role in the professionalisation of cricket. All that's missing is any sense of gratitude from many of the players whose financial futures he was instrumental in securing.

Even by the end of the book, Greig is by no means an easy man to like, but it's impossible not to feel the ice around him melt a little. He is so gloriously difficult. We tend these days to want to package our sports stars into easy, media-friendly compartments. Even in his late 60s, Greig refused to be pigeonholed. South African, Australian or English? His idiosyncratic TV commentary consistently failed the Tebbit Test everywhere he went.

Marcus Berkmann set the benchmark for heroic tales of failure in amateur cricket with his 1995 book Rain Men, which chronicled the weekly incompetence and petty rivalries of his nomadic cricket team, the Captain Invitation Scott XI, and established a new – and much-welcome – sub-genre of cricket writing in which the terminally useless and unfit, who make up 90% of the world's players, get their day in print. Sustaining interest and comedy in people known to nobody but the author and a few close friends is a hard act to pull off, and many writers have met with varying levels of success since Berkmann.

One of the typical problems with this sort of book is being able to believe that the team are quite as bad as portrayed. Amateur cricketers are prone to self-deprecation, and I've lost count of the number of times over the 30 years I've been playing for the particularly useless Hemingford Hermits that opposing captains have said before the start: "Oh we're really not very good at all – seven of our best players are on holiday", only to find we are 13 for five after six overs. So I've become deeply suspicious of cricket writers bearing gifts of false modesty. I will, though, make an exception for Not Out First Ball (Bene Factum Publishing) by Roger Morgan-Grenville and Richard Perkins, a book that oozes charm and humour from the very first page and, most important, describes failures of the terminally delusional so accurately that I could almost believe one of the more disloyal – and disloyalty is written into the team's DNA – members of the Hermits had written a roman à clef.

Every familiar character is writ large: the captain who has never quite been able to come to terms with the fact he is no longer head boy of his minor public school; the fast bowler whose shoulders went 20 years ago; the opening batsman who can't get the ball off the square; the wicketkeeper who can no longer bend his knees. Then there's the sledging. Why would anyone want to undermine the opposition when there's so much more fun to be had rubbishing your own mates?

I shouldn't end, though, without a brief salute to the pamphlets that cricket enthusiasts continue to self-publish. A special mention should be made of "Triumph at Wattle Flat: When Castlemaine Beat the Poms" by Richard Mack. I've no idea what spurs a man on to research a minor game between the first English side to tour Australia in 1861 and a Castlemaine XXII, and then write it up in such depth. But I'm glad that men like Richard Mack exist. Cricket – and cricket writing – wouldn't be the same without them.

A year ago, he was tipped to be the next England manager and his Tottenham team were riding high. Today the England job is a distant memory and his new team QPR have been relegated. Is he disappointed? No, reckons his biographer John Crace